CH 3

Chapter Title: Autobiographical Acts
Book Title: Reading Autobiography

Book Subtitle: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition
Book Author(s): Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv3m0.7
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Autobiographical Acts
Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into
the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—
overpopulated—with the intentions of others.
M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel
All these people—producers, coaxers, consumers—are engaged in

assembling life story actions around lives, events, and happenings—
although they cannot grasp the actual life. At the centre of much of this
action emerge the story products: the objects which harbour the meanings
that have to be handled through interaction. These congeal or freeze
already preconstituted moments of a life from the story teller and the
coaxer and await the handling of a reader or consumer.
Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories
We recognize that memory, experience, identity, spatial location, em-

bodiment, and agency are not separable constituents of autobiographi-
cal subjectivity. They are all implicated in one another. But disentangling
them in chapter 2, however artificially, allowed us to frame the psychic,
the temporal, the spatial, the material, and the transformative dimen-
sions of autobiographical subjectivity. Moreover, the concepts of memo-
ry, experience, identity, spatiality, embodiment, and agency enable us to
begin probing the complexity of what happens in a particular autobio-
graphical act.
Let’s situate the autobiographical act in a story, a story in time and
place. This situatedness is especially crucial since life narratives are always
symbolic interactions in the world. They are culturally and historically
specific. They are rhetorical in the broadest sense of the word. That is, they
are addressed to an audience/reader; they are engaged in an argument
about identity; and they are inevitably fractured by the play of meaning
(see Leith and Myerson). Autobiographical acts, then, are anything but
simple or transparent.
63

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64 · AUTO BIO GRAPHI CAL ACTS
In Telling Sexual Stories, sociologist Ken Plummer, considering auto-

biographical stories through the lens of a “pragmatic symbolic inter-
actionist ethnography,” differentiates three kinds of people who contribute
to every story action (xi). There is the producer or teller of the story—
what we call the autobiographical narrator. There is the coaxer, the person
or persons, or the institution, that elicits the story from the speaker. There
are the consumers, readers, or audiences who interpret the story (20–21).
While we take Plummer’s tripartite schema as a starting point in the fol-
lowing discussion, we complicate it by introducing other situational and
interactional features of autobiographical acts.
The components of autobiographical acts include the following:
• Coaxers/occasions
• Sites
• Producers of the story, autobiographical “I”s
• The Others of autobiographical “I”s
• Voice
• Addressees
• Structuring modes of self-inquiry
• Patterns of emplotment
• Media
• Consumers/audiences
• Paratextual frames
Coaxers, Coaches, and Coercers

Every day we are called on to tell pieces of our life stories. Think of auto-
biographical acts, then, as occasions when people are coaxed or coerced
into “getting a life.” The coaxer/coercer, in Plummer’s terms, is any per-
son or institution or set of cultural imperatives that solicits or provokes
people to tell their stories (21). Telling may occur in intimate situations
when someone solicits a personal narrative—for example, that intimate
exchange between lovers who seek to enhance desire by giving the gift of
their memories to one another. Requests for personal narratives may come
in letters or e-mail messages from friends and family members: “Tell me
what’s been happening to you. I haven’t heard from you for so long.” Com-
pulsions to confess may be coaxed by our internalization of religious values
and practices—the voiced confession of the Catholic Church, prayerful

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AUTO BIO GRAPHI CAL ACTS · 65
confession in silence in Protestant services, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Compulsions to confession may also be of a commercial kind, commodi-
fied in daytime talk shows that package the obsessions of popular culture
in neat segments on “loving too much” or “secret eating.” Publishers may
invite celebrity figures to tell life narratives to a public hungry for vicarious
fame. Friends and colleagues of distinguished people may urge them to
tell stories exemplary of public and professional life on formal occasions.
Coaxers and coercers are everywhere. Think of these everyday situa-
tions in which people’s stories about themselves are elicited in the contexts
of social institutions:1
• In political speeches candidates often tell compelling personal

narratives that may project “character” and “values” or situate
them in the major wars and movements of the time or attach
them to specific religious, ethnic, or vocational communities.
• In the communal confessions of self-help groups participants
conform their life stories to the narrative model, for example,
the Alcoholics Anonymous format, required of them to make
progress in recovery.
• In family gatherings, individuals participate in the shared com-
munal recollection of the family’s stories as rituals that reinforce
familial history and the very idea of the family itself.
• In hospital waiting rooms, people fill out forms requesting
stories of their bodies. Often their body narratives rematerial-
ize on film in mammography, ultrasonography, and MRI scans
that make their futures readable in signs of disease or bodily
abnormality.
• Every day people fill out standardized forms to get food stamps
or housing vouchers, driver’s licenses or passports. In each of
these institutional settings, personal narratives are conformed
to particular routines, bureaucratic imperatives, and identities
appropriate to the occasion.
• Through the bold-faced headings of personal ads, people advertise
their current fantasies, their sexual histories, and their desires.
• The conventions of the employment résumé require presenting
packaged credentials to prospective employers, condensing long
years of experience into job skills that signify more than they
state: the status of the institutions attended or the career path.

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• Every day people present themselves to the scrutiny of mem-

bers of groups they seek to join—neighborhood associations,
churches, veterans’ organizations, fraternities, or sororities.
Through these narratives they announce their qualifications
for membership.
• Raising their hands in court to “tell the truth,” people before
the bar become implicated in “crime and punishment.” Legal
testimony requires stipulating the facts of a verifiable identity.
When competing truth claims are presented, their adjudication
may require further personal revelations, sometimes against the
will of the witness.
• And now, as personal information travels in digital code, millions
of Web pages carry personalized visual and verbal narratives
around the world in microseconds.
This list could go on and on, taking us through cultural institutions, state
bureaucracies, nonstate organizations, friendships, cross-cultural encoun-
ters, communities, media, virtual reality. Global culture multiplies the
possibilities for both coaxing and coercing life stories.
Although the autobiographical narratives of published writers may, in
their highly crafted aesthetics, seem far removed from such everyday sites,
the coaxing to which they respond shares a number of concerns and fea-
tures with the kinds of autobiographical presentations we’ve described, or
that people might engage, in telling parts of their own stories.
Some coaxing is explicit. In his Confessions Augustine projects a coax-
ing God needful of his confession. In the section of his autobiography
begun in 1788, Benjamin Franklin includes several letters from friends
setting out various reasons all Americans would benefit from reading his
life story. The “Benjamin Franklin” friends want to coax from him is, of
course, a particular version of Franklin, the statesman, social benefactor,
and moral guide. In a comparable way, slave narrators were urged to re-
cite their narratives of slavery’s degradations in the setting of abolitionist
meetings and for the abolitionist press.
But coaxing is also more broadly diffused throughout a culture. Suc-
cessive generations of immigrants in the United States, for example, have
responded to the need to affirm for other Americans their legitimate mem-
bership in the nation by telling stories of assimilation. Some autobiog-
raphers publish their life stories in order to defend or justify their past

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choices, to “set the record straight.” In writing his apologia, In Retrospect:

The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Robert S. McNamara responded to
the continuing widespread debate in the United States about the Vietnam
War and the role of government officials in waging it.
Coaxing is an integral part of the life writing process when more than
one person is directly involved in producing the story. It can take several
forms. In doubled autobiographical narratives, two (or more) people offer
their versions of shared events or experiences, as do Mary Barnes and
Joseph Berke in Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness,
in which patient and therapist reconstruct their versions of the journey.
In as-told-to or ghostwritten narratives, multiple levels of coaxing take
place, including those of the ghostwriter or cowriter, whose prompting
questions, translations of the autobiographer’s oral speech, and revisions
are often invisible in the final text, as is the case with Alex Haley in The
Autobiography of Malcolm X or Ida Pruitt in A Daughter of Han: The Auto-
biography of a Chinese Working Woman, based on the narrative of Ning
Lao T’ai-t’ai. Yet another case of invisible intervention is the publisher
who requires that the celebrity or recovery autobiography be rewritten
and shaped for special audiences.
In collaborative life writing, we think of two people as involved in pro-
ducing the story: one is the investigator, who does the interviewing and
assembles a narrative from the primary materials given; the second is the
informant, who tells a story through interviews or informal conversations.
But with collaborative narratives of Native Americans and indigenous
colonized people, the situation is in fact often triangulated among three
or more parties. Someone must undertake the translation and transcrip-
tion from the indigenous language for the person who finally “edits” the
narrative into a metropolitan language, such as English, and a culturally
familiar story form, such as traditional autobiography or the ethnographic
“life.” This complex nexus of telling, translating, and editing introduces a
set of issues about the process of appropriating and overwriting the origi-
nal oral narrative. The case of Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a
Holy Man of the Ogalala Sioux as Told to John G. Neihardt, G. Thomas
Couser argues, is one in which a native informant in a transcultural in-
terview situation may “speak with forked tongue” (“Black Elk”). Couser
thus calls attention to the difficulty of translating what was suggested indi-
rectly or not said by an informant. Arnold Krupat has considered another
complexity, the “invented” English into which such narratives were often

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cast. But while the transcription-translation process often effaced charac-

teristics of an Indian language, Krupat argues, a text such as Black Hawk:
An Autobiography might be reconsidered as a collaborative effort to create
a “hybrid or creolized language based on English” that nonetheless seeks
to convey an Indian mode of language through linguistic invention (“In-
troduction” 7). A third kind of complexity is suggested by the publication
history of I, Rigoberta Menchú. Menchú has protested that the interven-
tion of the editor, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, effaced suggested versions of
its narrative by its translators, thus controlling the pattern of meaning of
the narrative (see Canby).
This politics of coproduction may be mediated differently when life
narrators who are deaf or otherwise prevented from directly recording
their life stories depend on someone to transcribe their stories into a
standard language such as English. Use of American Sign Language, for
example, mediates the life writing differently from the way it is when sign-
ing to an interpreter who then “translates” the text to a recorder-editor,
as H-Dirksen L. Bauman has shown (“‘Voicing’”). All these cases suggest
that collaborative life writing, as a multilingual, transcultural process, can
be a situation of coercion and editorial control presented in the name of
preserving the voice, the experience, and the culture of the life narrator.
Editorial exercise of censorship is a final example of coercion in the
name of coproduction at the point of publishing the life narrative. Zora
Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography is a life narra-
tive in which the publisher, concerned about literary propriety for a 1940s
white reading public, excised certain phrases and folkloric turns of speech
from Hurston’s manuscript and omitted altogether some “sexy” stories she
wanted to tell, as Claudine Raynaud has discussed (“Rubbing a Paragraph
with a Soft Cloth?”).
As we see in all these cases, the role of a coaxer in assembling a life nar-
rative can be more coercive than collaborative. Complicated ethical issues
arise when one or more people exercise cultural authority over assem-
bling and organizing a life narrative (Couser, “Making, Taking, and Fak-
ing Lives”). In giving thematic shape to life writing by virtue of decisions
about what is included or excluded, a coaxer can subordinate the narra-
tor’s modes and choices of storytelling to another idea of how a life story
should read and how its subject should speak appropriately. Although this
editorial coaxer often effaces his or her role in producing the narrative, a
preface “describing” the working relationship between editor/transcriber

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and narrating subject may try to control the audience’s reading, as Peter
Canby suggests in his account of the Menchú controversy.
What is a critical reader to do in engaging the complexities of collab-
orative texts? All of the examples discussed here argue, first, for specify-
ing the roles of various coaxers in making the autobiographical text, and,
second, for relinquishing the widespread notion that indigenous texts
produce a kind of unmediated authenticity. The stimulating debates of
anthropologists about participant observation, of historians about the
authority of primary documents, and of cultural studies theorists about
autoethnography offer critics of life writing sites and tools for situating
it as a mode of cultural production in which various voices and versions
contest, and contend for, authority.
Sites of Storytelling
The examples we have considered suggest the degree to which coaxing/
coercing occurs at particular sites of narration. Think of sites as both occa-
sional, that is, specific to an occasion, and locational, that is, emergent in
a specific mise-en-scène or context of narration. The site is, first, a literal
place, a talk show, perhaps, or a social service agency, an airplane, or, as
in the case of Carolina Maria de Jesus in Child of the Dark: The Diary of
Carolina de Jesus, the desperate favelas (slums) of São Paolo, Brazil. But
the site of narration is also a moment in history, a sociopolitical space. So
we might want to think about how particular sites of narration perform
cultural work, how they organize the personal storytelling on which they
rely. And we might think about what kinds of narratives seem “credible”
and “real” at particular sites of narration.
The appropriateness of personal narratives for particular sites is a cru-
cial consideration. Sites establish expectations about the kinds of stories
that will be told and will be intelligible to others. The autobiographical
presentation you make on a Web site, for example, would not be appropri-
ate in a legal setting and might cause real problems there. So the needs,
practices, and purposes of institutions that seek to manage some aspects of
our lives might be very different from our own needs and intentions in tell-
ing stories to others in intimate settings, or the ideal self-image we would
like others to know and believe from our more public self-presentations.
Occasional and locational, sites are multilayered matrices at which
coaxing and narrating take place. They may be predominantly personal,

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institutional, or geographical, though to some extent these three levels

often overlap. Let’s return to the example of a family gathering. Auto-
biographical acts in the context of a family reunion might have a lot to
do with a specific coaxer—an uncle asking a niece to recall what it was
like to spend time with her grandmother. But where the coaxer might
be specific—an uncle—the site would have far broader import, for fam-
ily reunions are occasions at which the ideology of familiality is enacted
and reproduced. In order to appreciate the meaning of autobiographical
acts in such contexts, then, we would need to consider the role of family
reunions in a family’s life, the ways in which storytelling within an ex-
tended family binds a group of disparate individuals together, the kinds
of stories that are appropriate to such occasions, and the kinds that would
be seen as violating codes of familiality. In an autobiographical narra-
tive primarily concerned with family relations, such as Mary McCarthy’s
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, family houses and rituals are primary
sites of narration.
Another institutional site is the prison cell. Here the locational norm
is forced incarceration, and with it the monotonous and deindividuating
routine of daily discipline. Within this context of state coercion, autobio-
graphical narrative can become a site of enabling self-reconstruction and
self-determination in its insistence on imagining forms of resistance to
those deindividuating routines. This was certainly the case with Eldridge
Cleaver as he wrote his manifesto Soul on Ice, or Jacobo Timerman in
Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. Earlier it was the case
with Albertine Sarrazin in “Journal de prison, 1959.” In her journal, this
young French vagabond writes against the cultural construction of the
female prisoner as defeminized by imagining (and at least momentarily
freeing) herself through writing the libidinal economy of heterosexual love
and desire.
In many narratives, the geographical location strongly inflects the
story being told. Jane Addams’s Hull House is both a social institution
and a location of impoverished immigrant Chicago in the early twentieth
century. Autobiographies as diverse as Edward William Bok’s The Ameri-
canization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years
After, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Vivian Gornick’s
Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, and David Sedaris’s Naked, all situated
in New York City, establish richly textured portrayals of its streets, bars,
apartments, and urban scene. In the vast and heterogeneous space of the

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city, stories of lives engage its particular locations as well as the complexity
of urban life for various kinds of subjects to produce not “New York City”
but diverse stories of the highly charged, dense, sensorily saturated, and
often jarring, hostile world of the city. This aspect of life narrative, as yet
rarely studied by critics who tend to see the site as a backdrop, shapes
the contexts of both autobiographical subjectivity and the kinds of stories
that can be told. Conversely, narratives steeped in the specifics of rural
place or wilderness—Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,
Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and
Place, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family—are also sociocultural
sites in which struggles about environmental, familial, national, and cul-
tural politics intersect as “layers” of narrative location. Site, then, more
actively than notions of place or setting, speaks to the situatedness of auto-
biographical narration.
The Producer of the Autobiographical “I”

Now let’s turn to the producer of the story, the autobiographical “I.” What
do we encounter as readers/listeners when we come to an “I” on a page or
hear an “I” in a story told to us? We know from the discussion in chapter
2 that this “I” is not a flesh-and-blood author, whom we cannot know,
but a speaker or narrator who refers to him- or herself. But much more is
involved in this marker of self-referentiality. While this speaker has one
name, the “I” who seems to be speaking—sometimes through a published
text or an intimate letter, sometimes in person or on screen—is composed
of multiple “I”s.
Often critics analyzing autobiographical acts distinguish between the
“I”-now and the “I”-then, the narrating “I” who speaks and the narrated
“I” who is spoken about. This differentiation assumes that the “I”-now in-
habits a stable present in reading the “I”-then. It also assumes a normative
notion of life narrative as a retrospective narrative about a separable and
isolatable past that is fully past. But, as our discussion of processes of auto-
biographical subjectivity revealed, this is too limited an understanding
of life narrative. It cannot account for the complexities of self-narrating
or the heterogeneous array of autobiographical modes. Nor does it ade-
quately capture the complexity of the “I” in even the most traditional of
autobiographies. We need to think more critically about the producer of
the life narrative.

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We propose complicating this autobiographical “I” beyond the “I”-

then and the “I”-now framework by attending to the multiple “I”-thens,
to the ideologies spoken through the “I,” to the multiple “I”-nows, and to
the flesh-and-blood author. Thus we can differentiate the following “I”s:
The “real” or historical “I”

The narrating “I”
The narrated “I”
The ideological “I”
The “Real” or Historical “I”

Obviously an authorial “I” is assumed from the signature on the title page—
the person producing the autobiographical “I”—whose life is far more
diverse and dispersed than the story that is being told of it. This is the
“I” as historical person, a flesh-and-blood person located in a particular
time and place. This “I,” as Chantal Mouffe notes, can be understood as
“the articulation of an ensemble of subject positions, corresponding to the
multiplicity of social relations in which it is inscribed” (376). This “I” lives
or lived in the world, going about his or her business in everyday life.
Because there are traces of this historical person in various kinds of
records in the archives of government bureaucracies, churches, family al-
bums, and the memories of others, we can verify the existence of this “I.”
We can hear her voice, if she is still alive. But this “I” is unknown and
unknowable by readers and is not the “I” that we gain access to in an auto-
biographical narrative.
The Narrating “I”

The “I” available to readers is the “I” who tells the autobiographical nar-
rative. This “I” we will call the narrator or the narrating “I.” This is a per-
sona of the historical person who wants to tell, or is coerced into telling, a
story about the self. While the historical “I” has a broad experiential his-
tory extending a lifetime back into the past, the narrating “I” calls forth
only that part of the experiential history linked to the story he is telling.
This narrating “I” usually, though not universally, uses the first-person
referent in this act.

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The Narrated “I”

It is crucial to observe that, and how, the narrating “I” is distinguished
from the narrated “I.” As Françoise Lionnet suggests, the narrated “I” is the
subject of history whereas the narrating “I” is the agent of discourse (Auto-
biographical Voices 193). The narrated “I” is the object “I,” the protagonist
of the narrative, the version of the self that the narrating “I” chooses to
constitute through recollection for the reader.
For example, a narrator may begin her narrative with memories of
childhood. She conjures herself up at the age of five or eight or ten. She
sets that child version in the world as she remembers her. She may even
give that younger “I” a remembered or reimagined consciousness of the
experience of being five or eight or ten as voiced through dialogue or in-
terior monologue. That child, however, is an objectified and remembered
“I,” the memory of a younger version of a self. The child is not doing the
remembering or the narrating of the story. Nor is that narrated “I” directly
experiencing that past at the time of writing the narrative or its telling. The
narrating “I” confronting the blank page or the computer screen or a live
audience is the remembering agent who creates the story. And that narrat-
ing “I,” as we will see, must be further theorized as occupying multiple, at
times contradictory, subject positions.
Complicating the Narrating “I”–Narrated “I” Distinction

Although we have offered a schematic framework for distinguishing the
narrating “I” and the narrated “I” of autobiographical narration and self-
presentation, that distinction is not sufficient when reading a particular
autobiographical work. The schema may be a helpful first step in engaging
autobiographical narrative, but its neat, binaristic logic needs to be com-
plicated and understood as a starting point from which to explore how the
“I” is encoded, represented, and engaged. To that end, we offer the follow-
ing considerations that qualify the “I” and suggest its inherent mobility.
First, there are times when the narrating “I” is situated in the second
or third person or first-person plural instead of the more common sin-
gular pronoun. Narratives as disparate as those of Edward William Bok,
Henry Adams, and J. M. Coetzee are presented through the third-person
pronoun. African American artist Faith Ringgold uses the second-person
“you” of self-reference in The Change Series: Faith Ringgold’s 100-Pound

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Weight-Loss Quilt, where she writes of herself as the “you” of disorderly

eating habits. Christa Wolf often uses the second person in Patterns of
Childhood to distance a past “I” of the Hitler years. We might speculate that
the effect of deploying the third-person pronoun is to disrupt the expecta-
tion of first-person intimacy, to create a sense of self-alienation through
objectification, and to open a gap between the narrating “I” and an im-
plicit narrating “he” or “she.” By contrast, the effect of using the second-
person pronoun is to reroute the expected address between narrator and
reader to an unexpected intimacy of exchange between the narrating “I”
and narrated “I.” In either case, we as readers become aware of the elastic
effect of conventions of distance and intimacy in life writing.
Second, the narrating “I” is an effect composed of multiple voices, a
heteroglossia attached to multiple and mobile subject positions, because
the narrating “I” is neither unified nor stable. It is split, fragmented, pro-
visional, multiple, a subject always in the process of coming together and
of dispersing. We can read, or “hear,” this fragmentation in the multiple
voices through which the narrator speaks in the text. These voices might
include the voice of publicly acknowledged authority, the voice of inno-
cence and wonder, the voice of cynicism, the voice of postconversion cer-
tainty, the voice of suffering and victimization, and so on. For instance,
the narrating “I” of The Autobiography of Malcolm X speaks in several
voices: as an angry black man challenging the racism of the United States,
a religious devotee of Islam, a husband and father, a person betrayed, a
prophet of hope, among others. Thus, the narrating “I” is a composite of
speaking voices. The “I” can be seen as a sign marking the site of multiple
voices that can be disentangled to a greater or lesser degree, rather than a
single, unified monolithic “I.” We develop this point in more detail later in
this chapter (see the section on voice).
Third, the narrated “I” can be conspicuously fractured and fragmented
as a thematic project. In How I Grew, Mary McCarthy writes of posing for
a poor artist whom she met in Seattle. “Canvas cost a lot,” she writes. “So
I, who was not yet ‘I,’ had been painted over or given a coat of whitewash,
maybe two or three times, till I was only a bumpiness, an extra thickness of
canvas” (161). Here McCarthy differentiates her earlier girl selves from the
writer she would become, “I.” But those old selves are visible as a palimp-
sest, a bumpy textual surface that leaves its trace in the layers of covering
wash. McCarthy’s narrative is a good instance of our larger point: while we
use a single “I” as a pronoun to refer to the autobiographical speaker in the

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text, not only the narrated “I” of earlier times but also the narrating “I” in
the temporal present is multiple, fragmented, and heterogeneous; the ut-
terance is in time, mobile.
Fourth, the existence of serial autobiography, either as chapters within
a single volume or as multiple texts, challenges any simplistic dichotomy
between narrating and narrated “I”s. As one narrative, and its narrative
moment and occasion, displaces another, stories from the past may be
rerouted through different narrating “I”s, who assign different meanings,
affective valences, and effects to events, stages in life, conflicts, and trau-
mas. The narrated “I” returns, to be put under a new definition, given new
identities, set in a new relation to history. Serializing the “I,” then, asserts
the condition of mobility, as one version follows another.
Fifth, there are certain narratives in which the narrating “I” produces
a narrated “I” that then becomes his or her agent of narration. This nar-
rating “I” can, for instance, be cast as the voice of a younger version of the
writer. In such narratives, it remains the case that the older narrator with
greater knowledge, narrative experience, and linguistic competence con-
trols the recourse to simplistic vocabulary, to truncated phrases, to sen-
sory description, all associated with the youthful narrating “I.” The child
narrating “I” of the storytelling is an “I” constructed by the experienced
narrating “I” to represent the meaning of that narrated child’s experience.
For example, in his best-selling memoir Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
deploys the narrative voice of his younger self to tell a story of growing
up in the rough streets and violent homes of Limerick, Ireland, and in
New York City. The intimacy of the narrating “I”’s voice comes through
McCourt’s attempt to imagine and capture a sense of what that experience
might have been like.
As an aside, we note that some narratologists would posit a third term
to complicate the narrating “I”/narrated “I” schema: the implied author.
Narrative theorist James Phelan, for instance, suggests that the narrating
in Angela’s Ashes is being done by the implied author rather than a nar-
rating “I.” The implied author in life writing is, according to Phelan, “the
knowable agent . . . who determines which voices the narrator adopts on
which occasions—and . . . provides some guidance about how we should
respond to those voices” (Living to Tell about It 69).2 A shaping, invisible
agent—who cannot be a flesh-and-blood author—the implied author per-
forms the functions of editing, arranging, and shaping the experience that
a narrating “I” reconstructs of a narrated “I.”

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In our view of autobiographical narration, however, the narrating “I”’s

voice is in fact the vocalization of the narrated “I”’s story as an oral pres-
ence. The narrating and narrated “I”s are temporally too interlinked to
both be effects of an implied author, and the project of self-narration is
too involved with its own process of reading and interpretation to sustain,
or require, this third term. It is, however, crucial to insist on the mobility
of the narrating and narrated “I”s. Phelan’s model of positing a triangular
situation (with narrating “I,” narrated “I,” and implied author) seems to
depend on a narrating “I” fixed in one temporal plane. We would argue
that the dynamism of much autobiographical work, its ability to put the
narrative situation into play, makes such a category redundant.
The Ideological “I”

Thus far, we have discussed the “I” as a site of self-relation but not as
grounded in any historical location or belief system. But, of course, the
“I” is neither a transparent subject nor a free agent. Rather, it is, as Louis
Althusser insists, steeped in ideology, in all the institutional discourses
through which people come to understand themselves and to place them-
selves in the world, or as Althusser terms it, through which people are
interpellated as certain kinds of subjects. Through discourses people come
to know themselves and their experiences in ways that seem normal and
natural. While Althusser’s dismissal of agency in the face of pervasive
ideological interpellation may be too hasty, as the occasional, partial, and
imperfectly enabling force of testimonial discourse in autobiographical
projects indicates, his focus on the many routes of interpellation influence
the subsequent theorizing of subject positions, and thus of the mobile po-
sitionalities of the “I.”
The concept of ideological interpellation also illuminates the impor-
tance of cultural notions of “I”-ness. The ideological “I” is the concept
of personhood culturally available to the narrator when he tells his story
(Paul Smith 105). Historical and ideological notions of the person pro-
vide cultural ways of understanding several things: the material location
of subjectivity; the relationship of the person to particular others and to
a collectivity of others; the nature of time and life course; the importance
of social location; the motivations for human actions; the presence of evil,
violent, and self-destructive forces and acts; even the metaphysical mean-
ing of the universe. Because every autobiographical narrator is historically

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and culturally situated, each is a product of his or her particular time and
place. A narrator, then, needs to be situated in the historical notion of per-
sonhood and the meaning of lives at the time of writing.
The ideological “I” is at once everywhere and nowhere in autobio-
graphical acts, in the sense that the notion of personhood and the ide-
ologies of identity constitutive of it are so internalized (personally and
culturally) that they seem “natural” and “universal” characteristics of
persons. Yet changing notions of personhood affect autobiographical acts
and practices; so do the competing ideological notions of personhood co-
existing at any historical moment. For the ideological “I” is also multiple
and thus potentially conflictual. At any historical moment, there are het-
erogeneous identities culturally available to a narrator (identities marked
through embodiment and through culture; gender, ethnicity, generation,
family, sexuality, religion, among others). Some narrators emphasize their
ideological complexity (Gloria Anzaldúa, Jean-Jacques Rousseau), while
others may bend aspects of the story to support a prevailing ideology, as in
narratives of religious conversion. But the ground of the ideological “I” is
only apparently stable and the possibilities for tension, adjustment, refix-
ing, and unfixing are ever present.
For instance, in “A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of
Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” the seventeenth-century Puritan Mary Rowland-
son remembers her captivity by the Narragansett Indians. Rowlandson is
at a “remove” from her sustaining Puritan belief system and subjected to
unfamiliar practices and values that seem incoherent to her. But her expe-
rience among the Narragansett also subtly shakes the foundations of that
Puritan ideology as she comes to identify with its unsaved, savage Other.
Despite her return to the community, she now sees its beliefs as one set of
values rather than how the world “is” and hence struggles with reoccupy-
ing the ideological “I” from which she was forcibly removed.
In the early twentieth century the Russian revolutionary Alexandra
Kollontai negotiates, in her 1926 Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated
Communist Woman, the call for a revolutionary “new womanhood” and
the cultural force of what she calls “the given model” of normative feminin-
ity. Throughout her narrative the residual imprint of the given model per-
sists even as she insists on the transformation to a new ideological model.
The ideological “I” occupies a different and complex location in Glo-
ria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. The narrator is critical of a po-
litical ideology of American expansionism that has appropriated Mexican

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lands and oppressed its people. To counter that prevailing ideology, in

which she has been schooled and which has judged her as marginal, she
counterposes an indigenous mythology of Mexican figures as a founda-
tion for reorienting Chicanas ideologically toward the “new Mestiza.” This
figure of hybridity also contests ideologies of the gendered subordination
of women and of heteronormativity. Anzaldúa wages her critique across
multiple borders, including the linguistic frontier of Spanish-English. In
so extensively mapping pressure points of resistance to an imposed ideo-
logical “I,” she defamiliarizes its naturalness. Her posing of Mexican god-
dess figures, queer identification, and activist woman-of-color feminism
gives these countervailing beliefs new ideological force.
Ideological “I”s, then, are possible positions for autobiographical nar-
rators to occupy, contest, revise, and mobilize against one another at spe-
cific historical moments. Only apparently a “choice,” they are nonetheless
multiple, mobile, and mutating.
Reading the “I”

As we read life narratives, we need to attend to these four “I”s or, rather,
to the three that are available in the autobiographical act before us—the
narrating, the narrated, and the ideological. We can look for places where
the narrator addresses readers directly or where he calls attention to the
act of narrating itself, to problems of remembering and forgetting, to a
sense of the inadequacy of any narrative to get at the truth of his life as
he is defining it. We can watch how the narrator organizes the times of
past, present, and future in the telling of the story as a way of teasing out
narrated versions of the “I” presented and the ideological stakes of those
representations in the present of narration.
Sometimes the narrating “I” produces an apparently continuous chro-
nology from birth to adolescence to adulthood. Sometimes she produces
an explicitly discontinuous narrative, beginning “in the middle” and using
flashbacks or flash-forwards. Sometimes exactness of chronology is of
little importance to the narrator. Always there are moments in the text
when that impression of narrative coherence breaks down, in digressions,
omissions, gaps, and silences about certain things, in contradiction. While
we may read the narrator’s recitation to us as one long, continuous narra-
tive, the text signals discontinuities that will not bear out our own fiction
of coherence.

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As one example, consider how, in The Education of Henry Adams, Henry

Adams omits the story of his wife Clover’s suicide. Just at the chronologi-
cal moment of her suicide, the narrative breaks into two parts. Reading
for this gap, we can explore how our knowledge of the silence resonates
with the split structure, undermining the illusion of narrative coher-
ence Adams’s narrator seems to project. We construct a coherent “Henry
Adams,” or other ideologically coherent “I”s, only by underreading the
ways in which the narrative calls attention to its own fissures.
Voice in Autobiographical Writing

When we read autobiographical texts, they often seem to be “speaking”
to us. We “hear” a narrative voice distinctive in its emphasis and tone, its
rhythms and syntax, its lexicon and affect. But theorizing voice as a con-
struct in life writing has not yet been the focus of sustained critical atten-
tion.3 How might we understand our attribution of a particular “voice” to
life writing? And how do we theorize the relationship of voice to autobio-
graphical acts? This section considers how voice arises at the conjunction
of narrating, narrated, and ideological “I”s and distinguishes it from the
spoken voice of the historical “I.”
Although life writing is published as words on a page, readers experi-
ence those words as the narrator talking to them, to persuade or demand,
to confess or confide, to mourn or celebrate. James Phelan suggests that
the concept of “voice” can be understood as “a metaphor, in which writing
gets treated as speech.” But, he observes, voice is more than metaphor; it
is “a learnable kind of synesthesia: as we see words on a page we can hear
sounds” (“Teaching Voice” 2). In those “sounds” we have an impression of
a subject’s interiority, its intimacy and rhythms of self-reflexivity.4 Voice
as an attribute of the narrating “I,” then, is a metaphor for the reader’s felt
experience of the narrator’s personhood, and a marker of the relationship
between a narrating “I” and his or her experiential history.
Inflected with distinctive rhythms or cadences, idioms, tone, and styles
of speech, and shaped by rhetorical strategies, voice has a charge that calls
the reader to some kind of relationship with the story and the narrator.
In life writing, as opposed to the novel, readers may uncritically ascribe
the voice of the narrative to the author. That is, the metaphor of “voice”
attached to the narrating “I” may influence us to think of life writing as
monovocal, told by a single individual who controls the telling of the story

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and its meanings. The syncopations of self-telling, however, are rarely uni-
tary, for the narrating “I” of an autobiographical text is often polyvocal, an
ensemble of voices. Autobiographical narration may shift through a reg-
ister of voices that are all aspects of the narrating persona. These voices
may be attached to particular identities and subject positions that the nar-
rator takes up in telling the story: for example, the voice of the parent or
the politician, the survivor or the confessor, the renegade or the celebrity,
the subaltern or the conqueror. Although the text unfolds through an en-
semble of voices, we as readers ascribe a distinct voice to that ensemble,
with a way of organizing experience, a rhetoric of address, a particular
register of affect, and an ideological inflection that is attached to the sub-
ject’s history.
Autobiographical narrators also incorporate the voices of others with-
in their archives of memory and reference. Most prominent among these
others is the narrated “I,” the voice attached to that remembered version
of oneself whose interiority is represented through its distinct syntax,
rhetorical address, style, and worldview and re-presented through re-
constructed dialogue or internal monologue. The complex relationship
of the voices of the narrating and narrated “I”s involves what Phelan de-
scribes as questions of distance (“Teaching Voice” 3). In coming-of-age
narratives, for instance, the narrating “I” can expand the distance between
him- or herself at the time of narration and the earlier version of him- or
herself who struggles toward the present, making the voices of the narrat-
ing and narrated “I” markedly distinct.5 In other narratives, the distance
is contracted and the self-commentary may be less ironic, detached, be-
mused, or censuring. Phelan suggests a useful set of differentiations for
the kinds of distance that affect the play of voices across narrating and
narrated “I”s, including “temporal, intellectual, emotional, physical, psy-
chological, ideological, and ethical” gaps (3).
Autobiographical narration is also populated with external voices. The
voices of literal others may be incorporated through citation of dialogue
or the use of free indirect discourse (in which the narrating “I” projects
another’s subjectivity by imagining his or her interiority of thought and
affect). The narrating “I” can embed, for instance, an imagined interiority
in the voice of a parent or sibling, a lover or friend. The voices of literal
others may be less individuated or specific than those of loved ones and
constitute the voice of a community or other kind of collectivity. The nar-
rating “I” may draw in a web of voices from the oral life of a culture, voices

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that may be conflicting or in relative harmony. Critics use the terms poly-
vocality or polyphony for the evocation of multiple conflicting or harmo-
nious voices in a text.6 Finally, the voice of another may enter through
the narratee within the autobiographical text (the imagined addressee of
the narrative), the reader to whom the story and its mode and texture of
storytelling are directed. (See the sections on relationality and addressees
below for an elaboration on these sites of exterior voicing in life writing.)
The conjunction of interiority and exteriority in a text produces the
“internal dialogism of the word,” a concept developed by Russian theo-
rist Mikhail Bakhtin (282). For Bakhtin, language is the medium of con-
sciousness. Because language registers play, as noted earlier, subjectivity
itself is dialogical; it is always an effect of “the process of social interaction”
(Voloshinov et al. 11). All of us become conscious of ourselves through
the languages available to us in the social groups to which we belong. An
individual’s language is thus permeated by other people’s words; and those
words combine as various discourses in the sociocultural field that are
multiple, contradictory, and, in Bakhtin’s term, heteroglossic. The voices
of the narrating “I” and the narrated “I” are permeated by a dialogism
through which heterogeneous discourses of identity are dispersed. These
discursive fragments affect the ways we narrate the past and the tropes
through which we route its meanings. Françoise Lionnet uses the term
métissage for the braiding of voices that issue from diverse languages and
ethnic groups in postcolonial life writing. She attends to how narrators mix
indigenous, often oral, dialects with colonial or metropolitan languages:
“The search for past connections must be a thorough reinterpretation of
the texts of the other ‘noisy’ voices of history” (Autobiographical Voices
23). This dialogism of the word, to which we are all subject, suggests that
the autobiographical voice is inevitably inflected by such ideological for-
mations as national and/or regional identity, gender, ethnic origin, class,
and age. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, for example, developed the concept
of “glossolalia” to particularize African American women’s enunciation
of a discourse in dialogue with complex otherness (22).7
Consider an example. Sean O’Casey’s I Knock at the Door, the first book
in his remarkable six-volume autobiography of his life as an Irish play-
wright and politician, captures the interplay of interiorized and exterior-
ized voices.8 In this narrative the adult narrator represents his childhood
as a time of coming to his distinctive artistic voice through hearing and
imaginatively rescripting both the language and the interior monologues of

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others, showing how his voice arose from the interplay of theirs. Troubled
by diseased eyes, the young O’Casey, in a Dublin family immersed in pov-
erty and hardship, listened to their articulations of a social world that be-
came a source for self-reflection and a provocation to his own creativity.
The polyvocal voices populating the narrative capture the heteroglos-
sic texture of Irish everyday life in rooms and on the streets of Dublin
in a Joycean incantatory mixture of fragments. In addition to the boy’s
voice—O’Casey initially refers to himself in the third person and later as
Johnny—an unnamed narrator adopts the rhythmic, repetitive phrasing
of an oral storyteller, as in the following passage:
And all this was seen, not then, but after many years when the
dancing charm and pulsing vigour of youthful life had passed
her by, and left her moving a little stiffly, but still with charm and
still with vigour, among those whose view of the light of life had
dimmed and was mingling more and more with a spreading dark-
ness; and vividly again, and with an agonized power, when she was
calmly listening to the last few age-worn beats of her own dying
heart. (11–12)
O’Casey’s musical prose with its onomatopoetic lilt interweaves the cadences
of oral speech that are distanced from the overview of the storyteller.
O’Casey uses interior monologue to capture a character’s thoughts as
voice, as James Joyce did with Molly Bloom. When Sean’s elder sister Ella
is married, the narrator refracts her subjectivity through the cadence of
her interior voice:
. . . as we go up the aisle facin’ the altar to be reverently an’ dis-

creetly an’ advisedly buckled together for ever an’ ever till death
do us part from that day forward for better’n worse an’ richer or
poorer in sickness or health to love an’ to cherish to hate an’ to
perish, me Ma says if I marry him, for he’s rough and uncouth, but
the love of a good woman’ll make him gentle an’ meek an’ mild, an’
even if all the gilt an’ braid an’ swingin’ tassels are hidin’ ignorance,
after we’ve been married a day or two, a lesson a night for a year’ll
learn him more than a swift way of picking out the coloured letters
of the alphabet. . . . (73)

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Here the turns of speech and the rhythm of breath create a lilting voice
that both discloses the sister’s ambivalence and shows her marital illu-
sions in a way her younger brother would not then have known. Other
characters are also depicted in their interior voices, for example, the
clergyman at the funeral (53–54) whose thoughts swing between bodily
discomfort in the cold to a fantasy of being home and the things he must
do that week.
The crowd itself becomes a collective voice in the telling of public events:
“But the vigour of the lusty singing voices was pushed down to a murmur
by a low humming boo from the crowd, growing louder and deeper till it
silenced the song and shook itself into a menacing roar of anger. A crash of
splintered glass was heard, and pieces of a broken college window fell tin-
kling on to the pavement below” (182). Rather than quoted dialogue, nar-
rative voices, both exterior and interior, texture what O’Casey is narrating
as speech and not mere reportage of events. Weaving together snatches of
dialogue and song heard on the street, repeated proverbs and clichés, he
assembles a pastiche of voices that turn what we think of as written life
narrative into a lyrical polyvocal song. Voice is dialogically produced yet
is not just the sum of other people’s voices, a set of citations, or the dia-
logue of multiple protagonists in a novel. O’Casey’s heteroglossic narra-
tive, in which his own voice arises amid and against others’, is an extreme
example that suggests how we might read the textured interplay of voices
giving rise to subjectivity in life writing.
Linking the concept of dialogism to the constitution of a subjective
voice is productive for understanding the complexities of autobiographi-
cal acts. There are other concepts also helpful to describe voice in life
writing. Consider three examples of what Nancy K. Miller has called ex-
treme genre, in which a compelling, unique, textual voice emerges in the
act of articulating a personally or politically unspeakable event (“Closing
Comments”). In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking the narrator
chronicles a year in which she tries to comprehend the sudden death of
her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the mysterious illness of
their daughter Quintana. Much of Didion’s narrative employs a dry, flat
reporting voice, attentive to details of medical procedure, which seems ob-
sessive in its concern with the material—autopsy details, clothing, food,
the passage of days. Another self-reflexive voice tentatively questions
her own mental status and juxtaposes citations from other writers about

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mortality that she references but cannot engage. Throughout her mem-
oir, she refuses a voice of grief and mourning, the expected way of tell-
ing and “overcoming” a story of loss and shock. The process of coming to
“speak” the irreversibility of death to herself emerges tentatively, if at all, in
a counterpoint of speech and silence.
In a different way, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss uses an unexpected
voice to chronicle her father’s long-term sexual violation of her, disclos-
ing details in a haunting voice tinged with erotic ambivalence. The narra-
tor refuses the abject position of one confessing victimization and crafts
a voice at once intimate and nonjudgmental for her disturbing story of
father-daughter relationship. In Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, by contrast, the narrating “I” shapes a voice both
authoritative and stirring to tell the story of his illiterate voiceless life as
a slave. It is the voice of the public abolitionist that Douglass became,
mixing the cadences of classical oratory with the preacher’s exhortations.
As each sentence unfolds, its cadences resonate with a critique of slavery,
contrasting exemplary stories of the stunted humanity he observed in both
master and slave with the rhetorician’s command of persuasive periodic
sentences that ring with conviction.
In attending to voice, then, we may be led to aspects of life writing that
raise questions about the relationship of narrative performance to the ex-
periential life of the “real” historical “I.” While we are reluctant to posit an
implied author, the urgency and intensity of lived experience in these ex-
amples of extreme genre inflect the narration in a way that a performative
theory of life writing does not adequately address. Crafting a textual voice
out of such experience raises the stakes of life writing and asks that readers
grant a different kind of authority to the narrators of such struggles, par-
ticularly when their voices are multifarious and ambivalent.
In many texts published in the past three decades, voice took on a
second meaning as a metaphor for speaking the formerly unspeakable, a
thematics of speech and silence. During the 1970s and 1980s, feminist ac-
tivists and critics called for women to speak out and invoked the trope
of “coming to voice” in calls for women to participate in consciousness-
raising and express feelings that had been repressed in the patriarchically
organized home. Voice became associated with the political agenda of
changing women’s lives, bringing them into the public sphere as actors,
and calling attention to women’s experiential histories, stories, and tra-
ditions of storytelling. Psychologist Carol Gilligan posited that women

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spoke “in a different voice” (the title of her book on the subject), grounded
in a different ethical development. “Coming to voice” meant articulating
an emergent subjectivity outside or against the repressive constraints of
asymmetrical gender relationships.
Incited by the slogan “the personal is political,” the Second Wave
feminist movement turned to life writing as a discursive mode and a self-
reflexive genre through which women could find, claim, and deploy a
“liberated” voice in becoming agents and actors. The voicing of socially
unsanctioned critique continues, literally and metaphorically, in life writ-
ing from the developing world by writers such as Assia Djebar. In “For-
bidden Gaze, Severed Sound” (in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment),
she crafts a narrative voice from those of women in the harem under
imperialism to enunciate a silenced group in “fragments of ancient mur-
muring” (Djebar, “Forbidden Gaze” 342). Similarly, other historical and
contemporary witnesses and activists—among them those in abolition-
ist and antislavery movements in England, Canada, the Caribbean, and
the United States in the nineteenth century and anticolonial movements
in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America in the past century—have
framed their testimonies of oppression through voice, as in Domitila
Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak! Bearing witness publicly thus in-
volves several acts: coming to voice, claiming social space, and insisting
on the authority of one’s previously unacknowledged experiential his-
tory. More recent testimonial narratives continue to be characterized by
the call for witnesses to come forward to attest to injustice, oppression,
and violations of human rights through voicing their stories, sometimes
in interlocutory situations where someone records them (such as truth
commissions).
Lest we too easily hail the metaphorics of coming to voice as a self-
liberating gesture, we might keep in mind that testimony also involves tell-
ing stories that put the narrator in jeopardy because what is told is in some
sense publicly “unspeakable” in its political context. That is, the personal
experience out of which a narrator “speaks truth to power” is fraught with
risk: public condemnation and ostracism or threats to family members.
Acts of witness also risk psychic injury. Acts of telling can trigger re-
traumatization, invite shaming in public exposure, address unsympathetic
listeners. Moreover, contexts of witnessing such as truth commissions and
the markets for stories of suffering influence and constrain whose story
can be heard and what kind of story can be told.

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Relationality and the Others of Autobiographical “I”s

The self-inquiry and self-knowing of many autobiographical acts is re-
lational, routed through others, as Adriana Cavarero (Relating Narra-
tives: Storytelling and Selfhood), G. Thomas Couser (Recovering Bodies),
Paul John Eakin (How Our Lives Become Stories 43–98), Nancy K. Miller
(“Representing Others”), and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (“Introduc-
tion: Situating Subjectivity”) in different ways have argued. This concept
of relationality, implying that one’s story is bound up with that of another,
suggests that the boundaries of an “I” are often shifting and permeable. Re-
lationality invites us to think about the different kinds of textual others—
historical, contingent, or significant—through which an “I” narrates the
formation or modification of self-consciousness. These include historical
others, the identifiable figures of a collective past such as political leaders.
In some autobiographies a narrator reads his or her “I” as having engaged
such figures as models or ideals. For example, the idea of American presi-
dents, as well as his contact with actual former presidents, drives Bok’s
narrative of self-formation as an ambitious assimilated American. Such
historical others often serve as generic models of identity culturally avail-
able to the narrator, which we have already discussed in chapter 2.
There are also contingent others who populate the text as actors in the
narrator’s script of meaning but are not deeply reflected on. And there
are what we might call significant others, those whose stories are deeply
implicated in the narrator’s and through whom the narrator understands
her or his own self-formation, as is the case in Edmund Gosse’s Father
and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments and Abraham Verghese’s My Own
Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS. Sig-
nificant others appear in narratives of several kinds. Relational narratives
incorporate extensive stories of related others that are embedded within
the context of an autobiographical narrative. As noted earlier, in Broth-
ers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman focuses on the story of his brother
Robby, who became a street criminal while Wideman became a writer
and college professor. In his effort to understand their different lives and
to memorialize his brother, Wideman interweaves his own story, not just
of growing up together but of deeply felt emotions about African Ameri-
can manhood. In In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story, Kim Chernin
weaves the narrative of her mother, and her mother’s voice, into her story
of a complex filiality among several generations of mothers and daughters.

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Traditional stories of empowered women as well as communal proverbs

and family histories of devalued women transmitted through generations
and in contexts of immigration and cultural change also form the core of
Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical narrative The Woman Warrior.
A relational narrative of a different sort is at the center of Paul Monette’s
life narrative Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. The partner of Roger Hor-
witz, a gay man who died of AIDS, Monette remembers a partner and a
relationship in a text that, as Couser notes, blurs the line between auto-
biography and biography. Monette struggles to narrate several stories
simultaneously—a chronological journal of illness and death, a romantic
love story that contests popular representations of gay men, an AIDS story
of cultural crisis in that community, a narrative of rereading and revising
a crisis in the gay community, and a narrative of rereading and revising a
journal’s gaps and emotions (Couser, Recovering Bodies 155–60). Monette’s
second memoir, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, is a prequel of his life
that ends with meeting Horwitz and realizing that his previous life, alone
and in the closet, was one of being “bodiless” (38) and “frozen” (173), with-
out a life. While family members, spouses, or lovers are not always the
focus of narratives of significant others, they are understandably promi-
nent forms of deeply felt relationship (Recovering Bodies 160–63).
Another form of significant other to whom a narrative may be ad-
dressed and in whom it may invest special meaning is the idealized absent
Other, whether secular or divine. Such narratives cannot “tell” the Other
because of the profundity and inextricability of the relationship, but allu-
sions to it as central to self-understanding resonate throughout the narra-
tor’s telling of a narrated “I.” In his Confessions, for example, Augustine re-
reads his experience before conversion through a language transformed by
conversion and his implicit dialogue with God. For Montaigne, his friend
La Boétie, who died young, is the significant other whose absence under-
writes the Essays. While Montaigne praises La Boétie as a “brother” and
has La Boétie’s essay “Of Voluntary Servitude” published posthumously,
he does not embed this “brother’s” biography in his own narrative. Rather,
in “Of Friendship” Montaigne asserts the impossibility of differentiating
his friend from himself: “Our souls mingle and blend with each other so
completely that they efface the seam that joined them” (1:28, 139). Simi-
larly, in his collaborative narrative Black Elk Speaks, the Lakota shaman
incorporates the voices of multiple others as he tells his story through the
dreams, visions, and voices of other spiritual leaders. Doing so, Black Elk

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secures the authority of his own visions by situating himself in a geneal-

ogy of visionaries.
Yet another textual model of the significant other organizing autobio-
graphical discourse is the subject Other, the other internal to every auto-
biographical subject. As Jacques Lacan has argued in The Language of the
Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, the illusion of a whole
self acquired in the mirror stage is an identification taking place in “the
imaginary.” The infant is both captivated and trapped in an image of self,
an alienation on which the ego constituted at this stage maintains a false
appearance of coherence and integrity. Life narrators by definition cannot
address the subject Other that in a sense speaks them. But critics can per-
form Lacanian readings of the fissures and gaps of texts, as, for example,
Shari Benstock does with Virginia Woolf ’s Moments of Being. Or the gap
can be read in the tensions of narrative strategies. In The Lover, for in-
stance, Marguerite Duras’s narrator shifts between the confessional mode
of first-person narrative and the novelistic mode of third-person narrative.
Duras, according to Suzanne Chester, “undermines the objectification to
which she was subjected . . . [and] appropriates the masculine position of
the observer” (445). Here the narrator exploits the otherness of her identity
as a young white woman in colonial Indochina to undermine the stability
of a colonizer and a colonized “I.”
These multiple others—historical, contingent, significant, idealized but
absent, and subject Others—suggest the range of relational others evoked
and mobilized within life writing for the purposes of self-narrating and
self-knowing. The routing of a self known through its relational others
undermines the understanding of life narrative as a bounded story of the
unique, individuated narrating subject. What these examples suggest is
that no “I” speaks except as and through its others.
Next we need to look more closely at the explicit textual other addressed
within the text, the other to whom the narrator tells his story. For, as nar-
rative theory suggests, a text’s narrator constructs an implied reader to
whom the narrative is addressed, even if never named.
The Addressee
The narrator of necessity tells his story to someone. That someone might
be in the same room, if the narrator’s story is told orally. But even in the
case of a written or published narrative, the narrator is addressing some-
one. Sometimes, as in a diary, that someone might even be another ver-

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sion of himself. We call this someone “the addressee,” although we note

here that scholars of narratology (the study of narrative structures) dif-
ferentiate the “narratee” from the “implied reader.” “The narratee,” notes
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “is the agent which is at the very least implic-
itly addressed by the narrator. A narratee of this kind is always implied,
even when the narrator becomes his own narratee” (89). Although nar-
ratologists differ in their understanding of the relationship of narratee to
implied reader, they concur on the importance of the ways in which nar-
ratives depend on addressees in the process of storytelling.
The implied reader is a particularly interesting addressee. The self-
narrator whose story is published cannot know who in fact her readers
(or, in Plummer’s schema, consumers) will be. But she cannot tell her
story without imagining a reader.
The implied readers to which self-referential modes are addressed vary
across time, cultures, and purposes. Some speakers imagine an addressee
as an intimate, as Glückel of Hameln does as she addresses her children in
her 1690–91 “Memoirs in Seven Little Books” (5), or as the Englishwoman
Frances Anne Kemble does when she addresses her journal entries describ-
ing her sojourn in the Georgia Sea Islands in the late 1830s as letters to her
friend “Elizabeth.” Others imagine an addressee at some distance. Spiritual
life narrators may identify “God” as the implied reader. Still others idealize
an addressee, as Anne Frank does in constructing the implied reader of
her diary as a sympathetic friend whom she names “Kitty.” And, of course,
letter writers who employ the opportunities the form offers to engage in
self-reflection, social or political critique, and philosophical speculation
in condensed form address their letters to particular persons who are at
once specific and universalized, as is the case with the letters of the Indone-
sian writer and activist Raden Adjeng Kartini, whose Letters of a Javanese
Princess includes letters written from 1899 to 1904. Sometimes the narrator
addresses a universalized implied reader directly, as Susanna Kaysen does
in Girl, Interrupted. “Do you believe him or me?” (71–72), she challenges
her addressee as she contests the power of the doctor who labeled her per-
sonality disordered and sent her to McLean Hospital as a teenager in the
late 1960s. Or this implied reader can be a category of people—the white
Northerners whom Frederick Douglass addresses in the first of his three
autobiographies, or the white Northern “sisters” whom Harriet Jacobs ad-
dresses explicitly in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Addressees can be imagined and addressed directly in the text or in-
directly through the text. And often there are multiple addressees in the

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narrative, narratees and implied readers addressed simultaneously or in

sequence. For instance, when the medieval mystic Margery Kempe dic-
tated her narrative to an amanuensis, she addressed a multiplicity of in-
terlocutors: the God to whom she would manifest her purity of soul; the
amanuensis on whom she depended for the preservation of her story;
the Church fathers who threatened her with excommunication, perhaps
even death; the community of Christians before whom she would claim
her rightful membership as a true believer and thereby secure her social
status.
Narrator and addressee(s), then, are engaged in a communicative ac-
tion that is fundamental to autobiographical acts and the kinds of inter-
subjective truth they construct. Attending to the addressee or implied
reader of a life narrative allows us to observe subtle shifts in narrative in-
tent. That attention also allows us to consider the kind of reader the text
asks us to be as we respond to such rhetorics of intent.
Structuring Modes of Self-Inquiry

Autobiographical acts are investigations into and processes of self-knowing.
But both the modes of inquiry and the self-knowledge gained or produced
change over time and with cultural locations. Thus there is a history to
presentations of self-knowledge. How one knows oneself today is very dif-
ferent from how one would have known oneself in a Socratic dialogue or
in the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis in the early modern period. Or
in the ritual Dreaming through which contemporary indigenous Austra-
lians in traditional communities understand their place within a system of
totem and kinship and through which they enact their systems of values,
beliefs, and relationships.
Some life narrators formalize schemes of self-investigation through
a method. And these have varied dramatically. In The Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin, Franklin produces self-knowledge through his “Proj-
ect of arriving at Moral Perfection.” John Donne produces his through
relentlessly self-questioning sermons; Montaigne through the self-tryouts
of his Essays; William Butler Yeats through the mythical system of A Vi-
sion; Saint Teresa through the topography of “interior landscape”; Robert
Burton through the anatomy as a physiological and systemic metaphor.
Each narrator developed and improvised on a particular structure of self-
knowing.

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Some well-known patterns for presenting processes of self-knowing are

linked to other genres of literature, such as the novel, and provide templates
for autobiographical storytelling. Among them are the bildungsroman or
narrative of social development, the künstlerroman or narrative of artis-
tic growth, the confession, memoir, conversion narrative, testimonio, and
quest for lost identity or a lost homeland or family. The bildungsroman,
for instance, unfolds as a narrative of education through encounters with
mentors, apprenticeship, renunciation of youthful folly, and eventual in-
tegration into society. The conversion narrative develops through a linear
pattern—descent into darkness, struggle, moment of crisis, conversion to
new beliefs and worldview, and consolidation of a new communal iden-
tity. In the quest or adventure narrative, a hero/heroine alienated from
family or home or birthright sets forth on a mission to achieve elsewhere
an integration of self that is impossible within the constraints (political,
sexual, emotional, economic) imposed in a repressive world and to return
triumphant. The testimonio unfolds through the fashioning of an exem-
plary protagonist whose narrative bears witness to collective suffering, po-
liticized struggle, and communal survival.
Conventions that are culturally and historically specific govern story-
telling options, narrative plotting, and the uses of remembering. And
those conventions have histories: that is, at certain historical moments
and in specific milieu, certain stories become intelligible and normative.
Yet such stories stretch and change, gain cultural prominence or lose their
hold over time. Think, for instance, of the genre of feel-good narratives
that have become dominant in contemporary American cultural life.
Conventions can also be displaced by newly emergent ones. For instance,
autobiographical narratives published in the late twentieth century—at
least those by women and people of color—radically altered the inherited
conventions of life narrative by their reworking of the bildungsroman to
account for the lives of formerly subordinated subjects.
And so, when we read or listen to autobiographical narratives, we need
to attend to methods of self-examination, introspection, and remember-
ing encoded in them through generic conventions. Sometimes the nar-
rator turns his method upon particular kinds of experiences, such as
dreams, and particular kinds of knowledge, such as intuitive, irrational,
supernatural, mystical, or symbolic knowledge. Sometimes the narrator
interrogates cultural forms of knowledge valued at the historical moment
of writing. Sometimes he establishes complex linkages between knowledge

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of the world/others and self-knowledge. Sometimes she imagines alterna-

tive knowledges. And sometimes she refuses the very possibility of self-
knowing, as is the case with the avant-garde narrators of works by Michel
Leiris and Roland Barthes.
Patterns of Emplotment
The expanded concept of autobiographical acts that this study proposes
leads us to review narrative plots or patterns from the perspective of a the-
ory centered in narrative modalities. We might broadly frame these as of
two kinds, although in practice these kinds are always mixed: temporally
based patterns, which concern the organization of narrative times; and spa-
tially based patterns, what might be termed, in the phrase of Susan Stan-
ford Friedman, the “geographics” of narrative subjectivity (Mappings).9
We are subjects in time: the time of our bodies, its rhythms and cycles;
the time of our everyday lives, the sense of their unfolding, the sense of
succession, of one moment turning into another moment, the accumula-
tion of our personal past; the time of history, our era, our place in a larger
narrative. When we tell autobiographical stories, we engage these multiple
temporalities. There is the time of our writing, the moment in life when
we tell our story, the moment of history. But even the time of our writ-
ing can extend over a long period of time, and its historical moment can
change radically. And then there is the time of the past under narration, a
past that may be long or short, expanded or condensed.
It may seem as if there is a strict division between time-past and time-
now in narration; but time in narration is always elastic. Thus there are
temporal patterns both of the narrator’s telling and in the telling. Some
narrators tell their stories from a relatively fixed moment of their lives,
as does, for instance, Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa. In this haunting me-
morial return, Dinesen reflects, after returning to Europe, on her years in
Kenya as irretrievably lost. But many narratives seem to have been writ-
ten at different times. Franklin’s Autobiography, for example, identifies the
narrator at different ages and in various professions rereading his past. His
autobiographical “I”s are serial, multiple, and heterogeneous, in part be-
cause of the long life span over which he narrated his life.
Autobiographical narratives can be plotted strictly by chronology, with
the narrator looking back on the life course and organizing the segments
of telling according to the movement of historical time. It may seem that

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chronology is an obvious way to organize time, but it is only one way.

Time can be scrambled; it can be rendered cyclical or discontinuous, as
in postmodern texts. Thus a strict linear organization of narrative can be
and often is displaced by achronological modes of emplotment. A narra-
tor may employ a scheme of associational, or digressive, or fragmented re-
membering told through multiple flashbacks and flash-forwards, as does,
for example, Janet Campbell Hale in Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daugh-
ter. Such a pattern is multidirectional rather than linear-progressive.
Ultimately, time unfolds through no stipulated measure (see Brock-
meier). The time-past of the autobiographical subject can be expanded. It
can also be compressed, fragmented, or repetitive. It can be belated, as it
may be for those surviving traumatic events and their aftereffects. And the
time of narration can expand when an autobiographical narrator reflects
on the process of writing his or her story. Moreover, time-now and time-
past can interpenetrate in ways that confuse the relationship of one time
to another, as our discussion of Rowlandson’s captivity narrative noted.
And since a narrative cannot recount all time of experience, its gaps as
well as its articulated times produce meaning. Since autobiographical nar-
ration gestures toward the future, the time of the past and the present of
writing are also triangulated with time future, as imagined and projected
by the narrator.
Temporality intersects as well with the spatiality of autobiographical
narration. Friedman suggests, in invoking a “geographics” of subjectivity
that the spatial mapping of identities and differences is distinct from the
chronological tracking of identity. “The new geographics,” she suggests,
“figures identity as a historically embedded site, a positionality, a loca-
tion, a standpoint, a terrain, an intersection, a network, a crossroads of
multiply situated knowledges” (Mappings 19). In The Words to Say It: An
Autobiographical Novel, for instance, Marie Cardinal locates the struggle
with her female body in the context of the Algerian struggle for libera-
tion from colonialism. Mapping the intersections of political oppression
and psychological repression of colonialism and sexism, the agony of
Algeria and the agony of her mother, Cardinal enacts the revolution-
ary potential of a psychoanalysis that links the psychological to the so-
ciopolitical. Similarly, in contemporary Australia, narratives such as Elsie
Roughsey Labumore‘s An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New
and Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town map the diverse
geographies of individual struggles within collective histories of physical

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displacement, cultural dislocation, and state forms of oppression affecting

indigenous peoples.
A pastiche of textual memories may layer the narrative by incorporat-
ing multiple forms of self-inquiry, borrowed from such genres as the lyric
sequence, fable, essay, diary, meditation, or public testimony. Life narra-
tive may also incorporate multiple media—graphic images, photographs,
tables, or charts—that juxtapose other geographic sites to that of the ver-
bal story. Narratives composed of heterogeneous modes and media of self-
inquiry and achronologically organized enable us to see more clearly how
narrated “I”s are indeed multiple.
The conscious diffraction of times of telling and the fragmentation of
chronological sequence are narrative means of emphasizing that a sub-
ject is not unified or coherent. That is, different modes of emplotment
and different media of self-presentation offer possibilities for and con-
straints on the kind of “I” that can be narrated. Let us briefly consider
some narrative genres that have provided occasions for autobiographical
acts. The fable presents the narrated “I” as an allegorical type enacting
human aspiration, as in, for example, John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to
the Chief of Sinners. The meditation presents the stages of a narrated “I”’s
reflections, with increasing understanding or momentary glimpses of the
meaning of her spiritual history, as occurs in The Shewings of Julian of
Norwich, Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, and Thomas Merton’s The Seven-
Storey Mountain. A secular narrative, such as Robert Burton’s Anatomy
of Melancholy or Loren C. Eiseley’s The Star Thrower, also can perform a
meditative exploration occasioned by situating a life within the context
of a system of thought. The lyric sequence may present the narrating “I”
as a subject charting its own moments of intense emotion and rereading
the narrated “I”s of previous poems as an increasingly complex structure
of self-reflection, as do the sonnet sequences of French Renaissance poet
Louise Labé and, in quite different ways, American poets Robert Lowell
in Notebook 1967–68 and Life Studies and James McMichael in Four Good
Things, for example. The sketch (or way of life) presents the narrated “I” as
a subject enmeshed in a way of life that may be recalled precisely because
it is a time now past, as happens in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.
The emplotment of autobiographical narratives, then, can be described
as a dense and multilayered intersection of the temporal and the geo-
graphic. By teasing out the complex ways in which life narratives are orga-
nized, readers may discover the cultural, or historic, or generic specifici-

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ties of these emplotments. As autobiographical acts increasingly innovate

modalities of self-representation, critics are called on to inventively con-
textualize the host of strategies that these texts employ.
The Medium
While we normally think about self life writing as an extended narrative
in written form, it is possible to enact self-presentation in many media, as
we discuss more extensively in chapter 6. The kinds of media that can be
used to tell an autobiographical story include short feature and documen-
tary films; theater pieces; installations; performance art in music, dance,
and monologue; the painted or sculpted self-portrait; quilts, collages, and
mosaics; body art; murals; comics; and cyber art. As Plummer suggests,
storytellers “even and more complexly can perform their stories—not just
in words and scripts but as emotionally charged bodies in action” (21).
Examples of the uses of mixed media for projects of autobiographi-
cal telling abound in the twenty-first century. In such story quilts as The
French Collection series, Faith Ringgold chronicles, as a künstlerroman,
the life of a black woman artist in Paris and in America. Quilt, painting,
text on cloth, the story quilts present, through a fictionalized narrative of
African American woman artist Willia Marie, Ringgold’s struggle to find
her place “in the picture” of Western art history and to make a place in
that history for the aesthetics of her African American quilting heritage.
The performance pieces of such artists as Laurie Anderson, Alina Troyano
(Carmelita Tropicana), Rachel Rosenthal, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco
Fusco, and Bob Flanagan become occasions for staging ethnically, racial-
ly, and sexually marked bodies, and for remembering and dismembering
the psychic costs of identity, cultural visibility, and the social construction
of difference. Since the Renaissance, artists’ self-portraits have power-
fully imaged the social milieu, virtuosity, and cultural myths of mastery
through which the artist has claimed the authority of his or her profes-
sional status.
Of course, the medium that comes most readily to mind in self-
representation is photography. Because photos individually or in family
albums seem literally to memorialize identity, they often accompany writ-
ten life narratives. Photographs accompany the autobiographical works
of Mark Twain and August Strindberg, and are a focal point of narratives
such as Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula:

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Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere:

The Extradordinary Autobiography of an Autistic, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor
and Sandra Ortiz Taylor’s Imaginary Parents: A Family Autobiography.
Photographer Joanne Leonard, in her recent Being in Pictures, reverses
the direction of the relation of photograph and autobiographical narra-
tive, juxtaposing a narrative of her professional development as an artist
and her personal experience of motherhood with a retrospective of her
life’s experimentation with the image as feminist consciousness. But there
are separate conventions in visual and verbal media. Photographs never
simply illustrate a written narrative. Each photo tells a separate story, and
taken together they form a separate, often conflicting, system of meaning.
Stories in photographs may support, or be in tension with, or contradict
the claims of the verbal text. To read these multimedia texts we need to
develop familiarity with the narrative and generic conventions of visual
compositions. This power of the photograph to “tell a story” of subjec-
tivity has become a fascinating focus of theorizing about life writing, as
studies by Marianne Hirsch (Family Frames), Linda Haverty Rugg, and
Timothy Dow Adams (Light Writing and Life Writing) suggest.
Finally, media may be assembled into what might be described as an
ensemble text of life narrative. This is the case with Kate Bornstein’s Gen-
der Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. Bornstein takes her ex-
perience as a male-to-female transsexual as a starting point for critiquing
the binary social construction of gender and gendered desire. Her strate-
gy of engaging the reader in actively interpreting gendered experience
produces a hybrid text, composed of photographs, a play, interviews, the
analyses of social critics and scholars, and a dispersed, nonchronological
personal narrative. No one medium or generic mode suffices for this en-
semble narration, and her cut-and-pasted text suggests both the suturing
of body parts and social networks, and the subversion of the system of
gender identity that its collage method achieves.
As the example of Bornstein’s narrative suggests, the media for self-
narrating are and have always been multiple, although critics until recently
have not often emphasized the autobiographical dimension of genres other
than published texts.
The Consumer
We have seen how life writing is addressed to one or more narratees and
the implied reader within the text. Both addressees are implicit in auto-

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biographical acts. But there are also actual readers of, and listeners to, per-
sonal stories. Plummer calls these readers and listeners the “consumers”
in the tripartite symbolic interaction that is personal storytelling. Most
literary critics call them audiences (or flesh-and-blood readers).
When someone tells his life story before a “live” audience, that audi-
ence is palpably there, soliciting, assessing, even judging the story being
told. Thus the audience directly influences the presentation of identity.
It shapes the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of
others. It has an effect on which narrative itineraries or intentionalities
are incorporated and which are silenced. And it may persuade the narra-
tor to adopt certain autobiographical voices and mute others. In a sense,
then, orally performing an autobiographical act minimizes the distances
between the narrator and the narratee, the implied audience, and the con-
sumer when the story is addressed to a live audience that, to an extent,
immediately and audibly responds.
But reading audiences are not such homogeneous communities. They
are heterogeneous collectives for whom certain discourses of identity,
certain stories, certain truths make sense at various moments. Although
they come to their readings of an autobiographical text with expectations
about the kinds of narrative that conform relatively comfortably to criteria
of intelligibility, they come from different experiential histories and geo-
political spaces. There are, then, constraints on the kind of “reading” such
audiences will take away from, or give to, an autobiographical narration.
Distances of both space and time further complicate our understand-
ing of the responses of audiences to life writing. Scholars of the history of
the book try to discover, through research into the material conditions of
publication, who constituted “reading publics,” the historical consumers
of life narratives at various times. They analyze what meanings reading
publics assigned a given text in order to understand the cultural meanings
it acquired at and since its first publication. And they assess the invest-
ments that religious, juridical, political, and/or cultural institutions may
have had in the reproduction—or suppression—of genres of life writing
or in a particular personal narrative.
How published narratives are produced and circulated among reading
publics, what routes they take through various institutions before they get
into people’s hands, are issues that affect the ways in which life writing
achieves its ongoing effects in social interactions. And because readers
“consume” narratives along with other stories from elite as well as popu-
lar culture, their responses to life writing are influenced by other kinds of

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stories in general circulation—in families, communities, regions, nations,

diasporas.
Consider two examples of popular American life writing that circulated
among reading publics throughout, and beyond, the nineteenth century:
Barbary Coast pirate narratives and Mary Jemison’s captivity narrative.
A fascinating subgenre of captivity narrative, the Barbary captive narra-
tives (both English and American, authored by Anglo and African writers)
were usually told by mariners captured by pirates and held in North Africa.
These tales were widely read as popular exploration and adventure stories.
But in the United States in the nineteenth century they were also read as
cautionary tales, warning of the vulnerability of the new nation to its Eu-
ropean trading partners, all of whom sought wealth in Africa (Baepler 25).
These tales mobilized divisions in American discourses of race at a key
moment in the early nineteenth century when the slave trade had greatly
intensified and slave narratives were circulating. A captive such as Afri-
can American Robert Adams, who told his story to a white editor in 1816,
was read as “white,” “Arab,” or “negro” by readers whose interpretations of
his narrative varied wildly according to their locations and politics (21). A
female Barbary captive, Eliza Bradley, wrote “an authentic narrative,” pub-
lished in 1820 as the true and harrowing tale of a white English woman
who, in captivity, was sheltered and never the victim of sexual advances
(247). This narrative, borrowing large parts of its story from a best-selling
adventure narrative of its time, captivated readers with its contradictory
notions of fragile and independent white womanhood. Barbary Coast nar-
ratives traded on exoticizing Africa as a land of extremes in bizarre stories
of grotesque spectacles. Both rationalizing and critiquing slavery in the
United States, they inaugurated a public taste for Barbary captive narratives
in print and into the twentieth century on the stage and screen (50–51).
A different aspect of reading publics is evident in the changing re-
sponses to the narrative of Mary Jemison, popularly known as “the white
woman of the Genesee,” told to James E. Seaver. Jemison was captured in
1755 by the Seneca Indians in what is now upstate New York and stayed
voluntarily for life with her captors, raising a large family. Her narrative,
first published in 1824, was so popular it went through twenty-seven print-
ings and twenty-three editions that ranged in size from 32 to 483 pages.
In these editions the story was reshaped as, at various moments, an eth-
nographic record of life among the Seneca and Iroquois; a “true history”
of captive experience; a document attesting to settler stamina; a nostalgic

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mourning for the decline of Indian life; a site for displaying photos of the
new sites and monuments of western New York; and a popular children’s
book (Namias 4–6). In examining its successive editions, we can trace
shifts in reading tastes by observing the modifications of content and pre-
sentation of the versions over time.
To date, the study of audiences for autobiographical narratives is not
a developed field. More scholarly work needs to be done on how popular
narratives are received and internationally transmitted, and on the shifts
in content and emphasis that occur from edition to edition in response
to changing public tastes. In sum, changes in reading publics can be sig-
naled by subtle changes in the material production of the book (in print
size; the use of illustrations, introductions, and appendixes; and in the
framing of the narrative for readers whose interpretative schema have
shifted dramatically from those of an earlier time). Since narratives are
riddled with the play of meaning beyond any fixed referentiality, reading
publics—or consumers—become cocreators of the text by remaking the
story through the social codes and psychic needs of their times. Umberto
Eco aptly captures this dynamism of publics for narrative by titling a sec-
tion of his 1979 book, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics
of Texts, “How to Produce Texts by Reading Them” (3). And reading pub-
lics are not the only groups influential in changing the shape and contents
of life writing. We now turn to how reception is also shaped by publishing
conglomerates, international markets, and online practices in our times.
Paratextual Apparatuses
Autobiographical acts and texts are situated in a paratextual surround,
what we might think of as the framing produced by their publication,
reception, and circulation. The concept of the paratext is identified with
Gérard Genette, who coined the word paratext as a combination of peritext
(all the materials inside the book) and epitext (elements outside it such as
interviews and reviews) (5). Genette distinguishes paratextual apparatuses
from the literary work per se, which is constituted “entirely or essentially,
of a text, defined (very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of ver-
bal statements that are more or less endowed with significance” (1). Peri-
texts are the materials added in the publishing process that accompany the
text in some way, including such elements as cover designs, the author’s
name, the dedication, titles, prefaces, introductions, chapter breaks, and

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endnotes. Paratextual materials—peritexts and epitexts—may appear to

be “neutral” aspects of the presentation of a text, but Genette argues that
they comprise a threshold that can dramatically affect its interpretation
and reception by variously situated reading communities.
Extending Genette’s study of paratexts to focus on the autobiographi-
cal, Gillian Whitlock considers how life writing circulates as a material
object that takes up space on a shelf or in a display addressed to the public,
whether or not individuals become its readers (Soft Weapons 56 ff ). Think,
for instance, of the importance of the book cover or jacket, which targets
a potential market (often different in different nations or successive edi-
tions) and makes an appeal for the book to be read in certain ways. Whit-
lock suggests that marketing departments produce a “look” for a book,
organizing it not only by its cover but by its epitextual surround, how it is
displayed in stores or advertised online, as a commodity for consumption.
Readers are solicited in an airport or during a casual Web browse by means
of cover images and jacket blurbs. Whitlock focuses on the outpouring
of “burka narratives” explicitly referencing veiled women after the New
York World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, as an example of
how, in such stories, the “images, the titles, and the subtitles are designed
to grab the Western eye with a glimpse of absolute difference, of the ex-
otic” (59). She provocatively argues that such life writing offers Western
readers the fantasy of explanatory stories about Islamic desires and rituals
for their voyeuristic consumption (61–62). But the effects of paratextual
apparatuses are indeterminate. Book jackets that invite Western readers
to translate narratives across cultures may induce us to understand our
own complicity in the circulation of cultural fantasies yoked to politi-
cal realities of domination (67–68). And life writing may turn up in un-
anticipated venues where it is heterogeneously displayed, for instance, in
supermarkets and discount department stores. As Whitlock emphasizes,
paratexts concern not only who reads whom, when, and to what effect, but
also the kind of audience solicited for a text at a given historical moment,
and the kinds of audiences that may subsequently take it up for different
occasions and purposes.
Let’s think further about the peritextual process. Publishers, editors,
compilers, ghostwriters, and translators often reframe a narrative through
different kinds of mediations. Editorial choices involve conforming the
story to publishing conventions and normalizing the plot by assigning
titles, selecting typeface and page layout, organizing the chapters and re-

161.64.160.65 on Thu, 06 Oct 2022 14:28:38 UTC
arranging their sequence, excising passages, correcting grammar and syn-

tax, and regularizing idioms to make the narrative intelligible to a broad
audience. Reframing might involve enhancing the truth claims of the nar-
rative, as when James Frey’s editor persuaded him to recast A Million Little
Pieces as a memoir rather than a novel. Publishers and editors often add
footnotes as verification and insert supplementary materials, such as the
photographs already discussed, as documentation of people and events
for general readers. Publishers incorporate prefaces that attest to the
character of the author. Nineteenth-century slave narratives and twenty-
first century witness narratives are often introduced and situated by an
“expert” whose authority lends credibility to the veracity of the life nar-
rative. These peritexts establish the bona fides of the person whose story
is told, attaching authenticity to the tellers who may lack narrative au-
thority at that moment and to their stories that contravene dominant
narratives.
The peritextual packaging of autobiographical writing shapes and situ-
ates the narrative by constructing the audience and inviting a particular
politics of reading. Compilers and editors sometimes produce collections
that place conflicting life stories in dialogue or tension, as did the compil-
ers of medieval saints’ lives, called hagiographies. Similarly, in our times,
there are contemporary collections of witness narratives by, for example,
survivors of childhood sexual abuse or the “comfort women” who were
forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military during World War II.
Packaging several heterogeneous stories as a collection can blur their dif-
fering contexts and truth claims, giving the misleading effect of a single,
shared story.
Particularly in cyberspace, life writing is situated amid epitexts such
as the publisher’s advertising and reviews posted by customers on book-
selling sites, indicating how it has been received and rated by readers
(Whitlock, Soft Weapons 61–62). Inescapably, in the consumer culture of
digital capitalism, our encounters with autobiographical narratives are
multiply mediated, whether they occur in material spaces or in cyber-
space. In their mediations, the paratext—peritexts and epitexts—helps de-
termine how audiences cluster at a particular historical moment around
particular kinds of narrative. Consider the power of Oprah Winfrey’s talk
show to shape reader responses to—and create massive sales for—the
books she chose for Oprah’s Book Club. Paratexts direct the habits of
reading publics and may constellate new publics. By understanding that

161.64.160.65 on Thu, 06 Oct 2022 14:28:38 UTC
autobiographical narratives are situated in the paratextual materials and

practices that surround them, and in the spaces they come to occupy in
our daily lives over time, we can more carefully specify how readerly au-
diences are shaped and changed both historically and in this moment of
global capital.
Conclusion
“The meanings of stories are never fixed,” concludes Plummer, “but
emerge out of a ceaselessly changing stream of interaction between pro-
ducers and readers in shifting contexts. They may, of course, become ha-
bitualised and stable; but always and everywhere the meanings of stories
shift and sway in the contexts to which they are linked” (21–22). This in-
stability and periodic revision of meaning account for the ever-shifting
effects of the autobiographical, and for the joint action of life narrator,
coaxer, reader, and publishing industry in constructing the narrative.
Getting a life means getting a narrative, and vice versa. In his influ-
ential essay “Life as Narrative,” Jerome Bruner powerfully articulates the
complex interconnections between lives lived and the narratives of lives:
Eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes

that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to
structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment
and purpose-build the very “events” of a life. In the end, we become
the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.
And given the cultural shaping to which I referred, we also become
variants of the culture’s canonical forms. (15)
It is in the contextual, provisional, and performative aspects of our auto-

biographical acts that we give shape to and remake ourselves through
memory, experience, identity, location, embodiment, and agency. Under-
standing the profound complexities of these acts enables us to better un-
derstand what is at stake in life narrative, in the narrator-reader-publisher
relationship, and in the international culture of the autobiographical preva-
lent in the early twenty-first century.

161.64.160.65 on Thu, 06 Oct 2022 14:28:38 UTC

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Chapter Title: Autobiographical Acts

Book Title: Reading Autobiography

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv3m0.7

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M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel

All these people—producers, coaxers, consumers—are engaged in

Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories

We recognize that memory, experience, identity, spatial location, em-

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In Telling Sexual Stories, sociologist Ken Plummer, considering auto-

Coaxers, Coaches, and Coercers

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confession in silence in Protestant services, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

• In political speeches candidates often tell compelling personal

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• Every day people present themselves to the scrutiny of mem-

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choices, to “set the record straight.” In writing his apologia, In Retrospect:

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cast. But while the transcription-translation process often effaced charac-

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institutional, or geographical, though to some extent these three levels

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The Producer of the Autobiographical “I”

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We propose complicating this autobiographical “I” beyond the “I”-

The “real” or historical “I”

The “Real” or Historical “I”

The Narrating “I”

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The Narrated “I”

Complicating the Narrating “I”–Narrated “I” Distinction

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Weight-Loss Quilt, where she writes of herself as the “you” of disorderly

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In our view of autobiographical narration, however, the narrating “I”’s

The Ideological “I”

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lands and oppressed its people. To counter that prevailing ideology, in

Reading the “I”

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As one example, consider how, in The Education of Henry Adams, Henry

Voice in Autobiographical Writing

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. . . as we go up the aisle facin’ the altar to be reverently an’ dis-

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Relationality and the Others of Autobiographical “I”s

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Traditional stories of empowered women as well as communal proverbs